Plan would let cannabis users smoke in pot clubs

Panel seeks to loosen rules on indoor consumption

With two months left until the sale of recreational marijuana becomes legal throughout California, San Francisco’s cannabis rules are continuing their twisted path through the city’s legislative process.

On Thursday, members of the Board of Supervisors’ Land Use and Transportation Committee amended the proposed regulations to make it legal to smoke pot inside dispensaries, an idea that drew resistance from the Department of Public Health.

“I think we’re going to need to have indoor consumption sites,” said committee chairman Mark Farrell. “This is legal. This is coming. We have tenants with ‘ no smoking’ provisions in their leases and nowhere to go.”

To that end, Farrell supported an amendment from Supervisor Jeff Sheehy to take indoor consumption permits out of the hands of public health officials and make them the responsibility of the Office of Cannabis. It passed

unanimously and will go before the full board on Nov. 14.

The specter of indoor consumption had put the health department in an awkward position, Sheehy said, noting the department’s “long- standing policy of banning smoking indoors.”

If the city were to stick by that policy, it risked pushing cannabis users into parks and onto sidewalks, Sheehy said.

“It seems surreal to me to be talking about safe injection sites for heroin use and then telling people who use cannabis that there’s nowhere they can consume,” he said.

The committee also approved an amendment by Supervisor Katy Tang to maintain San Francisco’s 1,000- foot buffer zone between dispensaries and schools.

Sheehy voted against the amendment, which goes against the Office of Cannabis’ recommended buffer of 600 feet. The 1,000- foot buffer has been cited as a reason cannabis dispensaries tend to cluster in certain parts of the city.

But the committee isn’t done tinkering with the rules. On Monday, it will vote on a proposal to bar cannabis shops from Chinatown, where there is strong opposition, and consider additional amendments that would enable San Francisco’s existing dispensaries to begin selling recreational marijuana on Jan. 1.

Office of Cannabis officials previously said they would not issue a single recreational permit until the city creates an “equity” program to help victims of the federal war on drugs break into the multibilliondollar cannabis market.

Supervisor Malia Cohen presented a complicated, 10- page draft of that program during a separate cannabis hearing Wednesday. Her version would prioritize people with past marijuana convictions or entrepreneurs who committed other nonviolent crimes, as well as people who were displaced from their homes within the past 22 years. As with the other rules governing cannabis sales, the program would have to be approved by the full Board of Supervisors.